This blog is maintained by two authors from the Great American Midwest

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Portland Metal

Recently I went out to lunch at a great restaurant called "Doug Fir" in the Hotel Jupiter on Burnside Avenue on the East Side of Portland (across the river). At the restaurant was a more than usual Portland-esque mix of folks - tables of 4-6 people that looked like a band with an occasional groupie mixed in, having breakfast / lunch around noon with drinks. Many of them had shirts and hats or jackets with various band logos and I thought of the "Unreadable Band Logo of the Week" post series over at MetalSucks.net. I was even able to kind of guess which type of band they might be by how they were dressed - doom metal, death metal, or more punkish metal, etc...

Lo and behold - while walking down the street I saw this flyer and indeed - there was some sort of metal band fest in town at the Bossanova Ballroom which was on Burnside right near the hotel. Thus my instincts turned out to be right.

According to one of the local weekly papers (that you typically grab for free out of a paper box on the street, or check online if you aren't old like me), the Portland Mercury, Portland is the most metal city in the country. They adjusted another poll that had Cleveland as the most metal city by noting that Cleveland's metal scene was mostly in the 1990's and those bands were defunct so when adjusted for "live" bands, Portland was #1.